Here we are, Tipomme has joined us and the family is complete.  Although at first, we thought people were looking askance at us because of our noisy children, the dog, it turns out, is a real object of fear and loathing.  In Bellingham, three people out of four I meet want to tell me what a wonderful dog I have, so well behaved, so beautiful.  I thought I'd be the toast of France with my dog.  But it turns out they don't have border collies here, and they must think they're dangerous because on my run yesterday, at least 8 people picked up their own dog or their children upon seeing us coming.  I know I have paranoid tendencies, and I know I don't understand french body and facial language anymore, but boy, they seemed to be giving me really dirty looks as I passed.  I think they gave me the evil eye, because I fell and injured my leg, and who knows when I can run on that beautiful river again.

Here is the Northern border of that 'square' I was describing yesterday.  These buildings were part of the medieval gate buildings a few of which still survive, but most of which were razed during the expansion of the city in the 18th century (remember, during the enriching of the city in the slave trade...  We went to the big castle today and I repent my comments about the slave trade from yesterday.  At the castle gift store, there is a huge abundance of books about the slave trade and about how slaves who somehow ended up in Nantes enriched the city.  So the French are not so backwards on these topics as I thought.)  

The gate, just to the north of this square, allowed one of my childhood heroes--Henry IV--to come into the city to sign the edict of Nantes that ended the wars of religion in France (sorry, my erudition ends here and I do not know the date).  

Here are the two pieces of playground equipment that Matthias mocked yesterday.  Those children played on those with more excitement and exuberance than they showed at the castle, whose early medieval ramparts, by the way, you can circumambulate completely, and part of whose living quarters you can visit.  But I guess children, like their parents, and even their dogs, really need the comfort of well known things to make sense of their world.  I promised myself that I would only be pedantic once in a while in this blog, and I think it's coming upon me right now.  I haven't thought much about philosophy in a long time, but making friends slowly with this beautiful city, I think back to Heidegger who thought the important way to think about knowledge was as a kind of apprenticeship, a making familiar of a certain area of the world or of thought, rather than a set of propositions, the way philosophers before and since have thought of it.  Certainly when confronted with this new environment, the knowledge that seems important to enjoying life again is that kind of 'taming' knowledge, of making familiar, so that I don't have to be glued to my map but can just be oriented naturally in the city, in the culture.

All this to say that yesterday, I was very proud of myself because I had to walk my mother to the train station, and I did it with great confidence, without having to look at a map even once.  AND I took her the scenic way through the arboretum.  Oh, and Mimi is making her own sense of the culture by figuring out what stores they sell lollipops in: some boulangeries, but not all, and all Tabacs (which are primarily cigarette stores).  I hope this orienting will make her less unhappy soon.